Safely Destroyed
by Little Obsessions
Summary: "She has to wash the grit, the oil, the dust from her skin. The earthy, thick cloy of the planet. The man. She has to wash that man from her skin. He's on her, like a slick oil which has to be soaped away. Lingering, obtrusive, under her nails and secreted until afterwards, when she thinks she is clean, and it's still there." Post 'Workforce' 1&2. J/C. Introspection in 3 parts.
1. Safely Destroyed

**Author's note:** 'Workforce', as with a vast number of Janeway related incidents, always annoys me in its failure to address the insanity of having your mind wiped, falling in love - physically and emotionally - and only hugging him and crying a bit at the end when you realise how terrible the whole thing is. There's no way that's all there was to it. It was really intrusive and violating. And I had to look at that.

There is explicit language in this and unsettling themes around consent and violation. Consider yourself thoroughly warned. 

So instead of writing something happy, which I set out to do in order to celebrate the auspicious 50th birthday of Trek, I ended up with this.

 **Disclaimer:** These characters don't belong to me, and nor does any reference or allusion to plots or idea that are recognisably Paramount's or CBS'. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories. I just enjoy it, and hope others do.

Kudos, comments and critique are most welcome.

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 **"But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed."**

– Federico Garcia Lorca

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The water rushes into the tub, the sound of it gushing to meet and bounce off of the steel disquieting to her mind. She nearly reaches for the faucet to close up the flow, to close up the noise.

To close up the blood rushing in her veins. The thought stabs at her for a second, cuts through the dark, cerebral realisation of who she is and of what she could become.

Maybe what she _has_ become.

She has to wash the grit, the oil, the dust from her skin. The earthy, thick cloy of the planet. The man. She has to wash that man from her skin. He's on her, like a slick oil which has to be soaped away. Lingering, obtrusive, under her nails and secreted until afterwards, when she thinks she is clean, and it's still there.

Her mind jangles with the concept of it, pulses with a fear she's never felt before.

She has no memory of it. No memory of the intimacy.

She has no solid, easily-recalled memory of intimacy any more. Mark has gone – a lingering, lukewarm anamnesis of passion. Sometimes she feels it, vague and fluttering across her mind; her rear pressed to the edge of the desk in her long-ago apartment, his thick hips between her smaller thighs. Then Justin. Justin is consigned, now, to the realms of disbelief, to the fantastical mind-palace of a woman just left girlhood. The sticky, driven heat of it is all that remains; an oblique sensation. She dreams of him, but as he moves within her his face is blank, featureless.

At first it was disconcerting but now the dream is comforting.

She has another fantasy – it takes numerous forms – but the main player, the protagonist of a wistfulness she almost finds humiliating, remains constant. She calls it up only when she really needs it, and now it is required with an infrequency which makes her gut ache.

She has no energy left for her own passion, or even her own relief. And anyway, that kind of tension is just the order of punishment she deserves.

She wears chastity because it reminds her that she chose this. As if she needs reminding.

She strips off the alien garments – like leather, but not quite, and a metallic blue which she finds confounding it is garishness. It does not deserve a second look as it goes into recycler, churned into atoms that will be better serving _Voyager_.

Serving its purpose and her purpose.

She's never been afraid of reality, she thinks for a moment. Then she realises she's been afraid of it before – of course she has – but that she's spectacular in her ability to face it.

The reality which greets her, staring back from a mirror she spends time with only fleetingly, is compelling in its horror.

Ribs, jutting out, avian in their delicateness. Hips and pelvis that show, skin stretching translucent over them. Breasts that have lost something, but it's not age; it's the nothingness she's relegated them to that's made them this way.

She looks age in the face, and disappointment, and the futile desire to succeed, and it looks right back at her. Stares her down. Defiant.

And, in its own grotesque way – skating on a higher plane than human consciousness can permit – it is beautiful. It is beautiful like the peace of a corpse, or the quiet of a disaster.

She turns away, her own disgust curling her mouth.

She shuts the water off, and climbs in.

The nodules of her spine rub against the steel of the bath and the bluntness of the pain makes her jerk up before she settles again, finding an angle that doesn't hurt as much.

The concept of intimacy – as abstract as it is for her now – terrifies her. Yet just these past few weeks this body, this vessel, has shared intimacy with a man. And she cannot recall it.

She can't know it. Even if she tries, even if she wants to.

And something about that is utterly invasive. She's been violated by what her body wanted and her mind couldn't know. The detachment splits her apart, renders her appalled by what these hips, this neck, these arms have done.

Another intimacy she can't get back, she's been robbed of. Yes it terrifies her, but she can't begin to explore how badly she desires it.

Not even sex – not the feral, almost-violent, entirely reptilian act of copulation which leaves the residue of intimacy after the brutality of the joining. The juxtaposition of it has never been anything other than evident to her, and it is a knowledge she's relished since the moment she recognised it. The agenda is set, the court begins, and the act is – of its nature – one of invasion. And living, sentient beings welcome it, seek it out. Desire it. She did, once, frequently. With men she loved.

She wants that, but not as badly as she wants intimacy. She wants to be held; with no agenda, with no expectation. _Kathryn_ , she thinks. Kathryn needs to feel the heat of someone else bleeding into her, softening her. Moulding her. She's losing her form. Even her mother, even her sister. Anything. Anyone.

She wants to be held, to feel someone else's skin against hers. To know that there is still value in touch. To value it like she used to.

The last intimate encounter, that she remembers anyway, – she cringes, berates herself – was that hologram.

She fucked a hologram. Then changed him. Or did she change him first, then fuck him?

She can't imagine she was even there, not really. Her fingers might have keyed the demands, her voice forcing the changes, but she can't remember feeling there.

It doesn't matter. After it was over, he added even more of a vaccum – photonic, cold, solid and entirely unreal. There was nothing left in her after he had faded away, returning to the binary codes he lived within, existing only as the bastardised version of Tom Paris' innocent fun. And leaving her, a victim of the act and an absentee of the intimacy.

She nearly fucked Kashyk. She thinks there has to have been something akin to an unearthly advocate keeping her trousers firmly around her waist, despite the ache lingering just below it. She can't imagine the Devoran would have paused to hold her, or to even enjoy being within her. It would have been an act of ownership, and only a fragment of self-preservation had stopped her from letting him carry it out.

And then this man, this kind, decent man from Quarra. She imagines him as a gentle lover, as someone who didn't pull or tug at either her body or her boundaries. Half-darkness, covers pushed to their waists, fingers grappling for a generous hold on each other.

He's been there, deep within, and she cannot know it – not even in the most basic sense. She has no memory of what has been done to her body, but she can catalogue the infinite damage that has been done to her soul.

She has to wash him from her.

She sinks lower in the bath, her head disappearing under the smooth water. Despite the torrid, fluid sting, she opens her eyes to the whiteness of the bubbles and feels the fragrant – too pungent, too much – oil of her bath swirl around her.

Maybe this is why she bathes, waiting for her skin to prune and shrivel, puckered and mottled – almost alien - afterwards. Waits for her bones to scream with the scalding intensity of the water she's learned to withstand as if it is a pleasure. The heat feels like bed covers, like the safety of an embrace. It's not a man's arms – or anyone's arms for that matter – but it synthesises a heat she is forced to believe she has lost forever.

She assesses the extreme capabilities of her lungs. First the lack of air is uncomfortable, then it is painful, then it is nihilistic. It engulfs her, dares her to ingest its heat, to let it gurgle into her blazing lungs. It tightens her breastbone, a halting burn which climbs her throat until she resurfaces, gasping into the ambient air of her ship. Her entire body spasms in reaction, a rage against her sudden desire to cease.

It takes a moment – an infinite one, where she recalibrates her decision to step over the edge - to realise she is no longer alone.

He is there. There is no metaphor. He is literally there, at the foot of her bath.

She acknowledges the distant, tantalizing reality that she should be alarmed by his presence here. He's overridden command codes to steal into her quarters, to steal into this harrowing moment, and it should aggrieve her.

But the heat makes her weak, loosens her sense of time and her sense of propriety.

And she needs to wash that man from her skin. With him here, it might be possible.

He is facing away from her and she doesn't know if he ever looked in the first place. It doesn't matter anyway.

The lines of his shoulders arch downwards, detracting from the broad, aristocratic bearing she's so admired – and occasionally admonished – over the years. He's shouldered more than just the scarlet uniform through this vast, uncharted perdition into which they've been flung. Dauntless at first, their determination is giving way to a despondency she didn't know she was capable of. At their worst, they have managed a viciousness she didn't know they could encroach upon each other.

She wants to reach out to him, to clamber from the tub and press her soaked body against the hewn, exotic darkness of him. Flesh to uniform, then flesh to flesh. She wants to reach up, to make a tactile memento of his tattoo with her fingers.

Sometimes they smart with a lusty urge to do just that, to feel the smoothness marred and inked by a tribalism she wants to understand. For all the science in her, the logic and curiosity coursing through her blood, she doesn't know what she could discover.

That's as tantalizing as it is unnerving.

He says nothing, and he does not look.

But across the space between – the heated, curdling, parched space through which their emotions cannot possibly traverse – she feels his intentions.

And they are intimate, and kind.

Tears: salting, stinging damnation, gather at the periphery of her vision and linger, blurring there, taking her back under the water. The distance between kindness towards her and the body she now occupies has been infinite, so it takes more than a moment for her to recognise it as an act of kindness, rather than one of transgression.

"I am here Kathryn," he says finally, voice lifting a fraction as it ruptures under the burden of emotion.

Then he slides down, to the slickened floor, to sit directly against the bottom of her tub, facing out towards the door and resolutely away from her. No one will come, she knows, but that is beside the point. He's here as a declaration of his loyalty to her, and his friendship. And whatever it is that goes between them, unsaid and unexplored.

She can't say love, because love is too paltry a word. And too daunting.

He is Praetorian in his tenacity, despite his silence. A Praetorian for the ages, a Praetorian for her.

 _Caligula_ , she thinks.

He might be the end of her. He might be the ultimate push, the final morsel of herself that she concedes to this gaping emptiness that is growing steadily more concrete as the days pass in a streak of stars. She's naked, he's here. And it would be effortless to yield.

But finally she is safe.

She is safe to reach for the sponge and rub it over her arms, then over her aching gut and down between her thighs – sore, unused, suddenly opened and resuscitated without her mind's consent. She washes the other man away, and he disappears into the swirling burn of the water lapping at her skin.

Now he's gone from her body, what she has done might take its leave of her mind.

He does not look, he does not speak. He does not move. And she is grateful for every moment that his breath is in the same room as hers.

He attends however, with a singlemindedness that is an intimacy all by itself. The clemency he shows, the lack of judgement, the inviolability he gifts her is all there as he faces away from her. It all sits on his shoulders, almost visible, for her to read as openly as she wants.

He's here, as he said, and he's always here.

'Friends', he told her, back on the planet.

And she wants to wonder if there could be anything more, but she knows she can't. So she doesn't.

She drains the water, reaches for her towel, and wraps it around her breastbone before he finally stands and faces her.

There's a reverence in his respect for her destroyed body which makes her want to disbelieve there can be such goodness in the one man. Despite her anger at his honour, she knows not one shard of his regard deserved to be attributed to mockery. It is completely pure and entirely real.

If she was a stronger woman, she would withdraw from the dangerous way he manages to enfold her, to wrap her in the belief that she can do anything when he will pick up the pieces of whatever she's managed to annihilate.

There is a mutual consent to their next steps, but he lingers in the sitting room while she towels the water from her clean, scorched skin. Ivory blooming angry, irritated pink. She wears it well, her pain on the outside.

She slips a shapeless, comforting cotton nightgown over her body. Scrapes her wet hair back with a cursory brush.

A few seconds later he is curling into the back of her, solid and real and full- uniformed, in the darkness of her room and the cold loneliness of her bed. There is no sex in the act, but there is a jarring, warm, terrifying, delicious intimacy to it.

She knows, instantly, that sleep which has been so absent will make a welcomed ingress tonight. She'll let that into her body, and into her mind, and there will be the white-calm she needs to reset her equilibrium.

Her custodian curls around her, pushing her legs up to her chest slightly with his own. They are cocooned, ribboned together. He sets a large and soft and warm hand on the flesh of her stomach, the heat turning frigidness to a sloshing lightness she hasn't known for a long while.

As if in water, her body sinks into elegant sleep.

Before she finally surrenders to the incessant urge to drift, dreamless oblivion tugging at her eyelids as his breath gusts hotly against her neck – breathing, forcing, life back into her - she assures herself he will not be here in the morning.

Tomorrow morning she will have to be the Captain again, and she will have to bank this violation of her mind and her body with the others.

But tonight she can let the pain recede, ebb and flow as it laps around the woman she is but does not know. She can do this in his arms, she is safe to do that here.

And both her mind and her body know it.


	2. Lavished and Spent

**Author's note:** Thank you for the previous reviews. I am glad you have enjoyed it thus far and hope you continue to.

thank you to my wonderful beta Mia Cooper for all the feedback!

Any critique, reviews or feedback is very much appreciated.

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"So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent…" **– Virginia Woolf**

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 **Part 2 – 'Lavished and Spent'**

He runs his fingers across the ink that has reappeared, parallel to his hairline, as he traces the flesh of his forehead. Now the ridges and the mutations are gone, he feels partly better. Superficially, only on the surface of any true peace, but better nonetheless. Now the skin is normalised, he stares bitterly at the lines. They are a tribute to the difficulties of the pilgrimage, and the pride he once carried about his aesthetic has dwindled to a powdery, nostalgic amusement at the vanity in the young man of long ago.

He's grateful though, in a way which makes his fingers drum tensely against his own thigh – resisting the urge to reach to his ear to tug there, painful and persistent –, that his skin has regained itself.

At least he's regained something.

He wants nothing to remain of what he's done here. He wants nothing of what he witnessed.

Amal Kotay.

He's relieved to be back in Chakotay's skin, to be back aboard _Voyager_. Nestled in the bosom of a nightmare they cycle through religiously, diligently, with a perverse pleasure; here, he can be himself.

Not that he finds himself particularly admirable anymore.

He's had no opinion of himself for a long time, actually, on blunt reflection. He avoids forming one now, because the very prospect of the practise seems a dangerous one. It seems self-flagellating, if he's frank with himself.

It is loose though, this skin, feeling odd and aged as he pulls his uniform back on. He's so glad to have his uniform to come back to.

As it slides over his body, flutters then flushes against his groin, he thinks of her. It's a reflex of his conscience, and his proclivity and his feral-brain. It's a thought rooted in time, base in its imagery, and disconcerting in its impact. But he cannot close it out, and in a frankly grotesque case of retreat, he's stopped trying to shut it down.

She's soft and willing, in his head, and she capitulates to him in the only way Kathryn could: fully, beautifully, and entirely in control. It happens because it's meant to.

When it's at its most vivid, this fantasy – dreams, emotional impasses, sleepless nights, when he lies alone in his bed –, he slides into her: under the table still, red dress bunched around her slender waist, her body cradled to him as a storm rages around them. Nature reminding human nature of its worst fault, and its cleverest mechanism.

She comes apart around him, enclosed, tight and warm and slick, fine back arched against his chest, his lips devouring her neck, his fingers forcing her into an ecstasy he knows she can achieve, even if she doesn't want to. It's easy to make her whimper, then moan, then cry.

And she says his name.

And in reality, he's already come apart a long time before this fantasy even reared its ugly, enticing head.

Why this is the moment, and this is the action which results in the thought, doesn't even deserve reflection. Until Kathryn Janeway, he'd never truly coveted anything. He'd felt jealousy – a soft, nipping resentment – on occasion professionally, or once or twice romantically, but he'd never coveted anything, not least of all another human being.

His acquaintance with the sensation has been incremental over time: first a protectiveness he didn't understand, compelling him to defend her when she was indefensible, then a sensation of conflagrant desire, hardening him and softening him simultaneously, making their command a practice in self-control.

Then a quiet, ephemeral distance that made the hurt, and the self-control, all the worse.

When he feels this particular sensation, the ripping, animal lust, – rare as it is now, and much rarer than it used to be – the compunction to warn her is overwhelming.

 _I want to take you_ , he nearly says.

But he doesn't.

She would be furious and she would be righ to be furious.

He slides against the toilet, settles down to cradle his tired mind in his own hands. Against his fingers, as he checks again just to be sure, his skin is smooth and unchanged. But something has altered or, at least, it's been rekindled in him. It's been awoken, slumbering restlessly for too long, in the recesses of his stitched-together heart. And it feels fearful in its intensity.

The reborn covetousness comes over him as a charging current, tingling to the extremities of his fingers and toes. It makes him furious and impotent, to know she wanted anything other than him.

And instantly it is chased by something else, something black and massive as it engulfs him. It steals over him breathlessly, punching him full force, square and thorough, right in his sternum.

The realisation makes bile swell in his belly and he pivots, crashes to his knees, and the effluent of his realisation pours into the bowl. His body retches as it clears his esophagus, rushes over his tongue and teeth and empties itself into the world.

He has no right to covet a relationship she did not want.

He has no right to covet the right to be inside her, when she's given that right to no one.

She granted no permission, and gave no passage, and it still doesn't matter.

She's been invaded, fully, and totally. And he is jealous. He's not sore, or offended, or disgusted. He feels absolutely nothing on her behalf, but he feels his own reaction thoroughly.

The first thing he felt, though he knew he shouldn't and can't and must not, is envy like nothing else he's ever felt.

Well, that's not strictly true. He knows she nearly fucked that Devore Inspector. The one with the smooth, lilting, animalism that she likes. Maybe she did fuck him, he wouldn't know. And Chakotay was verdant with jealousy then too. She likes men who can hurt her. That's why Justin makes sense, and Mark doesn't. And that idiotic stereotype of a hologram had to be changed to suit her proclivity for a man who likes a fight. But after she'd changed him, she definitely fucked him.

He's not supposed to know she did that, but he does. He'd laughed at her because it was like being wrenched to shreds by dogs. He'd told her to do it in the hope she wouldn't.

He spends an inordinate amount of time in the imaginary company of his competitors. Dark, brooding, brutish Justin; clever, philosophical, practical Mark. He doesn't know who else he should gather round his table of discards and miseries, so he keeps just these two…and they like him as little as he likes them.

They have the upper hand, though, because they've been inside her. They've had her arch, pale and glistening, against their chests. She's wrapped them in her, and herself around them.

They've kissed her until she's quiet.

And now this other man, this gentle decent alien, managed to pull her in, in a way Chakotay has never even skirted near. He'd add him to the conference of competitors, if only the other creature deserved as auspicious, and damned, a position.

The bile retches through him again, spilling out in an acidic mess of recognition, purging the sinister envy from him.

She's been invaded, defiled – not in the sense of innocence, there's no way Kathryn's got any of that left, – but he understands her well enough to know how consumed she will be with the violation of mind and body she's been subject to. _Against her will_ , he tells himself.

Against her will.

And he's unforgiveable for his envy.

He deserves more than a sloshing stomach as a punishment.

He wants to weep with guilt. It feels full and heavy to be so thoroughly wrapped only in his own reaction, and pushing past it feels impossible.

The emotion dissipates though – as he wills it - replaced swiftly by an anger, on her behalf, that is spectacular. She's been robbed of her mind, her faculty to decide what she will keep closed and what she will open. The revelation makes him incandescent with fury on her behalf, but there is no one at whom he can aim his anger.

She had no idea what she was doing.

The alien knew as little as she did of who she was, who she wasn't allowed to be.

And in her ignorance, she was blissfully, beautifully, erotically happy.

She was so happy.

Her contentedness, he recognises, was the element of _her_ experience on Quarra – and his own – which really made him envious. Ignorantly, she gave her body up. He can live with that, though it stings. She was never reserving it for him anyway.

What he cannot live with, if he pushes past the black-green envy, is the happiness she found in her amnesia. When she did not know him, when she did not know responsibility, or duty or loneliness, she was so very content. And in his mind, in a quarter reserved for the moment they finally get home – he believes they will, he believes that if anyone can get them home, it's her – he has always stored the possibility that she was reserving her happiness for him.

He had let himself believe she was preserving her delight, her ease, for the moment they could finally become what's been unspoken between them for nearly a decade.

He knew he could be jealous of her sharing her body – of opening herself like a rare, midnight bloom -, and live with it, as long as she didn't share her happiness with any other man.

He drags himself up from his knees, swipes his hand over the back of his mouth, and twists the faucet so water pours forth. He cups it in his hands, swirls it, and spits it out. Then he drenches his face and tries to wash away the guilt that's shaping his eyes, his mouth, and his brow.

It's categorically no use.

In an impulse – he gives it little thought because he knows that, if he does take time to analyse the likely result, he'll talk himself out of it – he decides to go to her.

He slips out into the corridor, which is quiet, and walks the few feet to her doors. He recalls the override filed in a neatly voyeuristic, hotly contested nerve of his memory, and keys it in.

The doors slide open.

The heat hits him instantly. It's different from Quarra's ashy warmth: wet, slick, steamy heat. Decadent and heavy with the scent of cherry blossoms.

He thinks to leave instantly but then he decides not to. He can't defend the decision to remain, so he doesn't. To mitigate the guilt he feels, he promises himself that if she asks him to go he will.

He hopes, futilely and desperately, that she will not.

He doesn't see her at first because the lights are almost grey, not at all invasive. The stars probably give more than the systems in her quarters; pale, weak and intentionally low. Then he realises he cannot see her because there's only a rippling image of her, and she's fluid and submerged under a mantle of jagged bubbles.

He is unsure for a second, then he realises she's making a decision – and it's not necessarily a sinless one. He nearly lunges forward to pull her from the choice but she beats him to it, sitting up so water spills over the sides as she gasps into being again, the breaths bruising and sore.

At least there's some will left. Some will, some fractional desire to live.

He will never address it as a witness, because she couldn't bear having it held up to her to acknowledge.

Her eyes are closed, so he can make his escape now, if he so chooses, and she'll never know.

But he's rooted to the spot. She's naked but it's repulsive because it's not something she's granted him.

He still can't move though. It's not the eroticism of the image, or the vulnerability which keeps him, but the pain.

She's in exceptional, singular, prodigious agony.

He only has to look at the grimace on her face to know. He doesn't need to look at the jagged protrusion of ribs or hips, or the scars that have coalesced across perfectly white flesh.

He spins away just before she opens her eyes, saving himself the humiliation of the dismissal and saving her yet more violation of the physical.

The only reaction which lets him know she sees him is the slight hitch in her already uneven breath.

He wants to go to her, to reach into the scorching water – how she can stand it is beyond him, because he's sweating under the choke-neck of his uniform – and to scoop her out, push her hard against his body and cradle her to him, mould her defiant shape to his. The water would roast his fingers, sensitize his nerves to the point of discomfort. He wants to feel her soak through his uniform, feel the water cool as he pulls her into him, and then to press her against his bare flesh after his uniform grows uncomfortably damp. He will give her warmth, and not the type that will drain from her.

"I'm here, Kathryn," he bites out, tears threatening with a heaviness like stone just behind his temple and eyes.

She says nothing, and that is permission enough. He lowers himself to the floor and leans against the bottom of the tub. He takes up his post, arms tense and hard, crouched in readiness he knows is thoroughly unnecessary, eyes focused singularly on an invasion he knows will not come.

The invasion is long since passed, and he's in its aftermath now. The residue of violation, he thinks, is a pain neither of them can cross.

He'll guard her, he swears, because he needs to. Because he needs to prove something to her, something even he cannot fully understand.

There is a protracted silence then he hears the water dribble and slosh as she begins washing her body. He shuts out the baser desire to fantasise over this and instead pictures how peaceful she used to be. When the sounds thickens and goes under water he knows she is washing the Quarran from the depth of her, from somewhere Chakotay, himself, will never go. Slick, wet, abandoned, abused, invaded flesh.

It was her happiness that tortured him.

It was her freedom which methodically dismantled the wall he'd built, then sliced the last sinews holding his heart together.

He curls his neck forward, amongst the quiet splash of the water as she cleans herself, years of use and lightyears of sadness sluiced from her skin, and resists the urge to weep.

She needs this, she needs to regroup.

He needs to be here, if only to assure himself that she can do it.

And he will guard her right to do that until the moment he ceases to draw breath. He'll defend her right to fuck whoever she wants, literally and metaphorically. Even if it isn't him.

But he will not stand by and watch her violated, torn to pieces. It has to stop, he tells himself, but he doesn't know where to begin. He doesn't know how to stop it.

Eventually she drains the water and he gives her time to cover herself. The towel is huge, soft, heavy and wrapped tightly around her breast.

When their eyes meet, for the first time in the while he's been here, there is a clarity there hasn't been for a long time and he knows, instantly, what she needs.

To say it is a relief to him is to devalue how grateful he is that he can be the one to do this for her.

While she dresses he lingers in the sitting room, nervous and determined in equal measure. His hands tremble, betraying him, as he slides his fingers over the books lined against the viewer as a pitiful distraction.

Then he enters when, with a natural understanding which is both warming and alarming, he knows she'll be ready. She's wearing a shapeless nightgown, which hangs in an angle over her apical collarbones and smothers the shapes her uniform doesn't really hide. Her hair has been scraped back messily, though the ends are drying and curling already. Her face is without any gilding.

She's beautiful. Achingly. His groin twitches and he hates himself for it.

With every notion of decency and determination and respect he has for her – every fragment that hasn't been shattered to desperation – he quells the blood flowing to possess the one part of his body he knows she does not want.

The bed is huge, emphasising how slight she is. She's pushed the sheets away to the bottom.

He climbs behind her, saving his breath for the moment she'll shut him out, dismiss him because it's the only way she knows how.

'Friends', he'd told her.

He's a terrible liar.

But she knows as much and she still entertains him.

He curls himself around her, bending their bodies. She yields to him, softening gently. He feels her lulled into sleep, her breathing loosening and evening and rhythmic. When he knows his body won't betray him, he pushes her legs up with his own so her backside is cradled in the rest of his hips.

Something in that gesture and knowledge is potent, powerful, as he recognises the intimacy of this act.

She's had no other man in her bed, he realises, she's let no other man – consciously anyway – curl her in his arms and hold her as she sleeps.

If this wasn't fully consensual, it would be the most violating act any man had ever perpetrated against her.

He'll leave before she awakes, he vows silently to himself, so she doesn't have to face the intimacy of this act in the cold light of day. He promises himself he will and he knows she will want that.

But right now, he slides his hand onto her stomach – flat and concave all at once – and curves the fingers softly to let heat bleed into her. She relaxes even more, if that's possible.

As slight as the noise is, she sighs audibly.

He won't be the first to have her body, he may never have it, and he's not going to have her happiness anytime soon. There is no happiness to be found here. It's been leached from her bones by time and pressure and command and the constant, fractional violations of self that she's been victim to.

But he can have her sadness, and there's something painful in the intimacy of that.


	3. The Ache for Home

**Author's note:** Ah,  so this has lots of adult content. Language, situations, themes are mature. Please do not read it if you shouldn't.

Thank you to those who have reviewed. I'm grateful for the time you take. And to my wonderful beta, Mia Cooper, for making this read much better.

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"The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." **― Maya Angelou**

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 **Part 3 – 'The Ache for Home'**

"It's over."

The words are dense with meaning, heavy with a weeping, transcendent joy. Her coffee has gone cold, and so has his. She hasn't taken a sip, actually. She'd poured it out of habit, and out of safety.

Coffee just doesn't fit the sense of occasion. There should be champagne for this, he muses. Then he wants to be blindingly, consolingly, astonishingly drunk.

He wants to get drunk with her. Heedless, reckless, throwing protocol and politeness to the wind. He wants to wake up, dry-mouthed and fuzzy with a residual hangover, and make slow, languorous love to her. With her.

That dream feels distant, even in the here and the now.

As she looks at him, his eyes give nothing away. She's been so long in the process of loneliness, that reading this man has become so much more difficult – it borders, now, on impossible.

Just outside of the viewer, Earth curves neatly, dispersing the stars to a secondary glory. They've had their time, these stars, she thinks, and he does too.

"It's over."

He repeats them, because he thinks she doesn't know what they meant the first time. He ended it with Seven, is what he means. She absolutely did understand but she hasn't had time to process those words. She, from another time, had warned her against this in an oblique way. She wishes that woman had come sooner, given her a chance not to make the mistakes she'd made.

And she had been utterly, blindingly jealous of the facts the Admiral had flung, a blind dart of desperation. She'd waited so long – portioned out to duty and protocol, with no room for anything that resembled love – and he'd decided to abandon her to the fate she'd consigned herself to. He'd let her give herself to that Quadrant, and to men she did not know and did not love, and he'd stepped away respectfully to consort with the more beautiful, the less damaged, the more considerate consolation for his pains.

What an honourable pig, she'd thought. Then as soon as they crashed into the Alpha Quadrant, she'd realised that was a path she didn't need to watch him go down and refuse to follow.

She does wonder, quite disquietingly, why the Admiral hadn't been more pained by the revelation of his decision. She does know, though, why that woman had been almost vociferous in her determination not to lay eyes on that tattooed countenance any more than she had to.

That would weaken anyone's resolve, that face.

He wonders how many violations – distant and more recent – the Admiral was subject to. He wonders when she broke so violently that he actually _chose_ another woman over her. He can't imagine it, not really, even though he knows he'd already started to pull away from her in this reality.

The thing with Seven, he thinks, went too far. It already had; one kiss and a brief grope into it and he knew it was a disaster waiting to happen. It had been flattering, stroking his bruised ego to a lighter hue of violet. It had been just after that night, wrapped in her, holding that bird-like body against his own that this thing with Seven had started to coalesce. And his gut and groin and heart had been aching with a loss he couldn't fathom. What a colossal, gratuitous mistake he'd made.

"It's over."

The third time he says it, something snaps, and she's suddenly under him. Or pressed to him. He can't decide and neither can she. All that matters is she's there and he is there. Their mouths crash together, hot and sudden, and she wants him.

She wants him so fully it hurts. She doesn't want sex or fucking; she wants unconditional joining. She wants to sign this agreement with every part of her. She doesn't even mind that her own body repulses her now, that only months ago the kind, ignorant Quarran had been within her. She can ignore it when it feel so necessary to finally capitulate to Chakotay. Her First Officer. Hers, without pretence, amendment, manipulation. With full, unadulterated, blinding consent.

She wants to erase Jaffen and Sullivan and Kashyk and Gath and Mark and Justin.

Her mind, her body, her soul is clean to this experience. And they want it. Gods how they want it. They are choral in their harmony of desire.

He wants her, but he always has. The surprise, for him, comes from that emotion being vociferously reflected in her body, and in her eyes.

"Kathryn," he's murmuring, even as he presses her against the edge of the workstation on which she's written the entire narrative of their seven year journey.

The poetic thought that this is where she commissioned him, aligned herself with him for the first time, and this is where she will finally align herself with him in the most intimate way possible, occurs to her.

It occurs to him too, and it makes him grin wolfishly against her skin.

"I want you."

The words aren't enough to adequately describe what she wants. She wants this, spectacularly, more than she has ever coveted anything.

"Mind and body?"

He asks it before he can check the absurdity. He needs to know there's alignment, a wholeness, to her desire. He can't be the one to break, now, what he's so carefully cultivated.

She knows her confusion flashes across her face, before she touches his cheek reassuringly, promisingly.

"Yes."

It warms her like bath water, lapping delightfully, translating into a tingling, indecent urgency between her legs. There is real warmth here. Human and soft. There is no violence, no fear, no chemically-induced ignorance.

There is nothing other than a promise struck up years before coming to a deserving conclusion. And oh-so-real heat.

She is radiating heat, real and washing over him. Once he sets her on the desk's surface, he goes behind the workstation, never once removing his hands from her body – lest the loss of contact tug him from the dream he's suddenly in – and pulls her flush against him, sliding her across the surface so her back meets the solid heat of his chest and abdomen.

Those other men, competitors, users, lovers, traitors, bastards, have never had access to the happiness blooming in her now, radiating from her in bursts of intense joy. He feels it like a surge of energy, changing the very structure of his emotions as they are: jealousy becomes reticent, anger vanishes, and bitterness mellows to a sense of completion.

She watches his fingers come from behind to slide into the collar of her jacket and it splits easily apart at the seam, falling open as he tugs it from her and pulls it down her arms. He sucks, devours, delights in the taste of the skin of her neck. His hands are on her breasts then, curling round and up her ribs to hold them.

Heavy, but not quite, and just the right fit for his eager hands. He's dreamed of this and it isn't disappointing. But he's too impatient and the low, panting breaths she takes as he pinches hard and just right for her – knowing what she'll need by some force of a deity he will forever be thankful to – threaten to make him lose his concentration.

As his fingers slide down to her waist band and prise her shirt from the tight grasp of the trousers, a mad urgency to speak his name, to tell him again, encroaches on the mindless pleasure of him pulling the shirt from her body and exposing her to _Voyager's_ controlled environment.

"Chakotay…I want you inside me."

He stalls at the words, his fingers pausing on the clasp of her bra as one hand still grasps her firmly around the waist, and then of all things he moans. A wrenching, guttural, long-suppressed moan. It stalks out of a cage it's been confined to, deep in the recesses of his soul.

The noise in his throat isn't a moan of lust, or even satisfaction. It is one of extreme gratification. It's a final, vocal clarification of what he's wanted, no, needed, to hear for much longer than he cares to admit and his reaction is the only thing he knows to do.

The groan he makes stops just short of painful, and she understands it beautifully. From here they can both see the Earth, facing out into the glowing cerulean and cloudy whiteness and tinges of green they've longed for.

And yet they've longed for so much more.

There's something wildly erotic in the supplication of it all – her back flush to his chest as she sits on the desk and he stands behind her, his hold on her hips digging and aching and right, and her legs raised slightly and braced against the edge, both of their eyes on the most satisfying sight they could possibly imagine. Not because it's their finishing line, not really.

It's because it's their starting line.

And he's always been just at her back, looking out into the same future as her. There is poetry in their current position.

Her bra falls to the floor.

"Say it again."

She does, letting her head fall back onto his shoulder so she can say the very words against his gentle, powerful, clever mouth, tilting her lips against his jaw to do so. She wants to tell him he's always been inside her, in a manner more real than even what they are about to do. In more ways than any man ever has been. He's been in her humour, her mind, her trust, her heart, and then finally her soul.

He sees the answer, feels it, loves it, before she speaks.

"I. want. You. You. You. Inside. Of. Me."

The staccato, definite determination in her voice as she repeats it and repeats it and repeats it makes his hips jerk up to grind at her lower back. She literally whimpers at the contact. Then his fingers find their way beyond the tightness of her waistband and into her underwear, questing easily.

"Let me..."

She slides forward and away from him, pulling his hands from her as a result, undoing the seal at the side of her trousers so she can drop them onto the floor. She takes initiative and relieves herself of her panties too.

That move delights him as she lifts her hips to accomplish the feat. Kathryn approaching this in just this manner fits. Pragmatic, invested, demanding.

He wrestles his own jacket off, then his shirt. He wants her flesh against his own. It's what he's always wanted.

When she knows he's finally, mercifully, disrobed it distracts her and her trousers fall just as he whips her back across the desk. He pulls her against his chest, and wastes no time, hand reaching around her thighs and down, fingers plunging – not without skill – into the depths of a place he never thought he'd get to go.

Her legs, tight with the play of reluctance, fall open around his hand and spread out on the surface of the desk to accommodate those wonderful fingers as much as she can.

Now he'll retreat here, she tells herself, and he tells himself, when he needs peace.

And when she needs it too. She will always come back to this, to the moment she could finally call theirs.

As his fingers work against her and she presses into them, hazily aware of his selflessness but listless in the clambering desire to find release, he speaks. His words are soft and gentle and though she can't see his face, she hears trepidation in his voice.

He needs to ask her, he needs to be sure, as one hand moves to his own trousers to fumble indelicately with the seal.

"Are you happy Kathryn?"

The banality of the question – as if he doesn't already have the answer – makes her laugh breathily, though it's stilted by the sensation of impending bliss.

He laughs too, when he realises how the answer is already there, like a third person.

Or maybe it's a huge mass of planet just off their port bow, he thinks.

"Yes."

She gives him the answer he needs though. No witty rejoinder or haughty response. She wants to give him this.

She's telling him, without words but with actions as she compels him round the desk to face her and positions him between her thighs, that he is more to her than a physical intimacy.

It's easy to position, inch forward, then slip into another world entirely.

"Kathryn," he locks into her, slides home.

"Home?"

Her eyes are wild, beautiful, glittering as she asks.

He's momentarily fascinated by the intimacy of their thinking and the shared, threading metaphor they've chosen.

"Home," he clarifies.

Then he moves, pushing deeply, fully, unbelievably there, into her. He's not the first to have her body, but it certainly doesn't feel that way.

He's good, as good as she's ever had. If not better. Certainly, she thinks as she glances quickly at the Earth, he's the most she's ever wanted.

As if she knows he needs it, she stills her body. He feels what he's longed for, and the readiness of her invites the kind of pride he thought he'd never feel again. Despite the wrongness that's been here – the users, the charlatans, the people who broke her into pieces he thought he could never recover - She feels right.

It's the only way to describe it.

She needs to speak again, even though words often shatter the eroticism of the moment. She should save it for when they're spent, when they're lying curled up like shells on her bed. Maybe it'll be his bed. It won't matter. They'll be together.

"You are all I've wanted," she kisses his mouth gently. "For a very long time."

It goes unspoken that he's amongst the things she didn't have.

He grins, splitting any lingering doubts to pieces, and begins to move in counterpoint to their tongues, mouths hot and yielding to a heightening connection.

"Tell me what you like," he urges, his fingers finding their way between them to a place familiar to him now, between nipping little kisses.

"There…oh…" she arches back to push more into him, levelling her hands flat against the desk for support. "And slowly…at first."

His mouth is pulled, seamlessly, to her breast simply by the pure, defined contrast between pink puckered skin and ivory curves.

This is something of the fantasy he used to have. But it's infinitely better than that.

He moves within, and she moves within too, pulling him and pushing him.

Incoherently, she relishes the skill in his fingers, his mouth, and his body. Relishing the absolute, complicit consent in this.

He rocks into her, movements pushing his fingers to rub tightly, and she begins to loosen her hold on the determination to see it out with him. She isn't going to be able to.

Her body is beautiful. It's scarred, and worse for wear, but it's beautiful to him. It's thinned and tired and perfect. When he has a moment, he's going to show her how to love it again. He's going to transfer the love he has for it, right now, over to her.

She is amazed he can worship, still, at the altar of this older, ruinous, tortured body. That he can want to push into her as if he can do nothing else. It thrills a part of her to life that she was convinced had died. She might grow to desire herself, as well as him, if he keeps this up.

He feels her lose it, as if it's a familiar sensation. And he leaves her breasts and neck to cover her mouth, to imbibe her cries.

When she finds the peak of the experience, when her body shudders to a halt around him, she cries into him and arches, tightly and hotly. And everything; Earth; misery; violations; heartbreaks; _Voyager_ ; disappear and all that is left is the lack of space and time between their bodies and their minds.

As surprising as it is it sends him, unprepared, over the edge too. He merely groans into her, thrusting forward once more to define the purpose of the act.

The warm sensation of him losing himself to her, pushing inside her as deeply as he can, is utterly intimate. What he leaves behind will be a messy completion and one she'll adore. Her thighs are sticky with him, with the heat, and the absolute rightness of it. She will not wash this away. She simply doesn't want to.

It was perfect.

That's all he can think.

He devours her happiness.

 **-0-**

Later she lies in his arms, clean but full and warm, after a bath where he slid in behind her and held her flush, a cushion against the steel.

Their last act of command, before leaving _Voyager_ , was to give in to each other.

"Will you wake me in the morning?"

She asks it, needing to know. He turns to look at the glittering lights of San Francisco.

It turned out they chose her bed, in her new quarters. There's a discarded bottle of champagne on the bedside table.

He understands that she must check. He will too, at times.

"If you'll let me, I'd like to do it every morning."

"Then we will be happy."

She says it without anything other than honesty, and it is Kathryn who speaks, and it is the most intimate revelation of them all.


End file.
